US is arming ISIS through ‘moderate’ opposition – former CIA officer

The US congress armed the Islamic State (ISIL) extremists by providing weapons to the “moderate” opposition, former CIA counter terrorism officer and Senate Foreign Relations Committee senior investigator John Kiriakou told Sputnik.

The FSA is an armed Syrian opposition faction, considered “moderate” by western countries, fighting the Syrian army loyal to President Bashar Assad since the beginning of the civil war in 2011. In 2014, the US Congress allocated $500 million to create FSA force of more than 5,000 men by the end of 2015.

“They [the FSA] didn’t help at all: supporting them only made matters worse. Most of the US arms that were sent to them only found their way into the hands of the Islamic State. Congress paid for the arming the Islamic State” Kiriakou said.

According to him, ISIL forces in Syria had been able to capture and use modern US equipment from the FSA just as their counterparts in Iraq enjoyed the use of huge quantities of US equipment they had captured from fleeing US-trained Iraqi forces.

The US idea of “a liberal, democratic freedom-loving, peace-loving opposition,” an alternative to Syrian President Assad, was just nonsense, Kiriakou said. The US should have stayed out instead of making the situation worse, he added.